Management of sliceable transponder with NETCONF and YANG

NETCONF is emerging as Software Defined Networking (SDN) protocol for the control and management of optical networks. It enables data plane device configuration and access to monitoring information. NETCONF may exploit YANG data model to describe network elements to be controlled/managed. YANG and NETCONF are of interest for operators since they provide a standard way to control and manage network elements, independently from the vendor. This paper presents and demonstrates a management plane based on NETCONF protocol. In particular, a YANG model describing optical transponders supporting slice-ability, variable rate, and monitoring functionalities is proposed. NETCONF experimental demonstrations are carried out to validate the proposed model and to prove the control and management capabilities of these technologies applied to elastic optical networks (EONs).